A son, 13, tries to look ahead

Sep. 6, 2006 4:44 AM

Kevin Villa, 13, of Yonkers holds a portrait of his mother, Yamel Merino.

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THE JOURNAL NEWS

The faces of Sept. 11

Five years later, The Journal News revisits those whose lives were forever changed by the terrorist attacks. A new profile will be published every day through Sept. 12 and they can be found at LoHud.com.

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YONKERS -- On the fifth anniversary of his mother's death, Kevin Villa will try to console the adults around him by not shedding any tears.

"When they see me and I'm not crying, sometimes it helps them," said Villa, 13, whose mother, Yamel Merino, an emergency medical technician, was killed Sept. 11, 2001, by one of the falling twin towers as she was attending to the injured.

Villa will try to treat Sept. 11 like a normal day. His grandparents, who are raising him, can't.

"There is no day that it does not come into the conversation," said Leslie Jager, Villa's grandfather. "It's going to be a cloud over our lives until the end because you cannot forget about it and you cannot get away from it."

His mother's life story struck a chord with America — at 24, she was a single mother advancing in her career, and a rare female emergency responder killed in the tragedy.

Merino worked for about four years for the White Plains-based MetroCare Ambulance Corp. She was sent to the World Trade Center from the company's Mount Vernon site after the first plane hit the complex. She was the only worker the ambulance company lost that day.

A Journal News photograph of Villa and his grandmother, Ana Jager, bending over Merino's coffin at her funeral appeared nationwide, and the country responded by organizing benefits and memorials, to which Villa and the Jagers are still invited.

Yet Villa, a tall, slender and soft-spoken youth, is reluctant to attend them.

"I go when my grandmother goes, sometimes," Villa said. "I like them because they are showing respect for the people who died, but I'm not much of a going-out person."

Instead, Villa, like most teens, enjoys hanging out with his friends and playing video games.

He isn't a big movie fan, so he has not seen a recent Hollywood film based on the terror attacks. His grandmother said she doesn't want to see it.

"Each person has their own way to cope with the tragedy," she said. "I respect everybody's way, but I'm not ready to see that."

Ana Jager said her grief has not diminished in the past five years.

"The eyes are dried, but my heart is broken. You try to put the pieces together, but there is no way," she said. "(Kevin) told me that some days he doesn't like to talk about his mother because it makes me sad and I start crying, but I like talking about my daughter."

Villa, an eighth-grader, said he tries to look forward rather than revisit the past, though he's not sure what awaits him.

"I don't really have plans for the future, but as I go to school I'll find out," he said.

Villa hasn't spoken at any of the memorial events he's attended, but if asked to, he said, his speech would be short.

"I would probably say don't live in the past," he said.

"Some time or later you're going to have to get over facts like that, otherwise you might not be able to leave that sadness or depression."